Word Problems
by icepixel
Summary: This is essentially an over-extended joke concerning a train from Moscow to Kiev. To get the punchline, you'll have to have seen "All the Queen's Horses." Fraser/Thatcher pairing.


**Spoilers:** This is essentially an overextended joke. To get the punchline, you'll have to have seen "All the Queen's Horses." This is set sometime between that episode and season three.

* * *

It had been a long day, and Meg Thatcher was currently on what appeared to be turning into an even longer train ride. For reasons that didn't need exploring at that juncture, and which would undoubtedly cause her untold amounts of paperwork when she returned to Chicago, she, Constable Fraser, and thirty-nine other Mounties were currently partaking of the uncomfortable seats and flickering fluorescent lighting of a train headed from Moscow to Kiev at seventy-five kilometers an hour.

She sighed and looked around the train car. All the other Mounties, save one, appeared to be fast asleep. She wished she could do the same, but the seat she was in, covered in an itchy brown fabric, seemed to have been built for someone much taller than her. Someone like the man beside her, who was currently staring out the window, engrossed in the sun setting over the landscape that was rolling by.

As if he sensed her watching him, Fraser turned and gave her a small smile. "It was nice of Minister Petrushka to schedule our return so that we could take in some of the scenery."

She glanced out the window. The foothills they were in looked vaguely ominous in the gloom. "Indeed. Although none of our colleagues seem to be conscious enough to see any of it." Her word choice niggled at her brain in time with the swaying of the train. She glanced back at Fraser, who had gone still. The niggling suddenly transmuted into full-fledged realization, and she caught her breath.

Fraser was very carefully not looking at her.

Meg's dutiful side warned her not to say what she was thinking about saying. She ignored its advice. "Fraser, did you happen to understand any of what the minister's odious little aide said about the route this train would be taking?"

Fraser swallowed. "I believe he said that the train would pass within fifty kilometers of Kursk, Belgorod, Chernihiv, and...Chernobyl, sir." For the first time since the word "conscious" had left her lips, he met her gaze.

"Isn't that interesting," she said. As if she were reciting to a schoolroom, she continued, "The current political situation has led to a significant amount of guerilla and terrorist activity in this part of the world. There's a possibility--extremely slim, of course--that our train may be a target. One never knows."

She saw Fraser lick his lips, a brief flash of pink tongue against a face that had gone rather pale. "Should we...do something...about that?"

Meg's dutiful side threw up its hands in defeat and stalked off. Meg stared at her junior officer, quite certain that he had every idea of what "something" she thought they should do. She had the idea it was something he was rather keen on himself. She leaned toward him, heart racing.

And that was how, on a train loaded with unconscious Mounties, which (perhaps) had been taken over by terrorists, and was heading (sort of) for a nuclear catastrophe, Meg Thatcher and Ben Fraser came to be kissing the living daylights out of each other.

This time, Sergeant Frobisher was nowhere to be seen, and then only stopped when they were good and ready. And in desperate need of breath. Reluctantly, Meg allowed them part, and she let her hands, which had been engaged in their own explorations of her constable's body, drop to her lap.

She took in Fraser's rumpled uniform, his newly-mussed hairstyle, and the way his lanyard now hung at a cockeyed angle. She could still taste him on her lips and in her mouth, and knew she probably had a particularly dazed expression on her face. Idly, she reached over the few inches between them and straightened the lanyard. The hair, she decided, was hopeless.

Fraser cleared his throat. "May I?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he placed the velcroed strap of her collar back in place. She hadn't even noticed it had come undone.

"Thank you." She ran a hand through her own hair and found it as hopeless as Fraser's.

"Shall we?" he asked.

"Shall we...oh, yes. Of course." She stood up, Fraser following close behind, and headed toward the engine.

---

Many, many apologies for my spent-five-minutes-googling-it Russian and Ukrainian geography.


End file.
